What is romance nowadays? Is it a glossy paperback with dog-eared corners? Is there a mane of red hair? A swelling bosom?

Or is romance chivalry?

After you. Je vous en prie.

No.

Romance has not survived.

Who are we kidding?

For romance to have survived, love would also have had to survive.

But wait…

I see…here and there. Is that not love?

Ah…romantic love. A different thing.

I assure you, dear reader, if you have made it this far into my ridiculous litany of theses that you shall be rewarded for your efforts.

What we have here is the final film by the great Max Ophüls.

I have heard this picture described as a flawed masterpiece.

Pay no mind to such estimations.

This is the product of a genius spilling his guts onto the celluloid canvas.

Film. Celluloid. When did it start? When did it end?

Once upon a time, film was flammable.

And our film is certainly flammable.

Martine Carol, who plays Lola Montès, is one of a kind.

This particular performance…I must admit, this is one of my favorite films…such a powerful experience.

But Carol is not alone on the grand stage. No… This production would not be the breathtaking spectacle it is without the incomparable Peter Ustinov.

Ustinov is the ringmaster. As in circus.

The important point to note is that Ophüls made a psychological metaphor of the circus…and created a film which is probably the longest extended metaphor ever captured by motion picture cameras.

But it is not a typical circus.

It is a nightmare circus. A cusp-of-dream circus.

Every shot is effused with symbolism.

The little people…haunting Oompa Loompas…little firemen from a Fahrenheit 451 yet to be filmed. Bradbury had published in 1953. But it would necessitate Truffaut in 1966 to make the thing so eerie. It is that specific vision…the firemen on their futuristic trucks…which Lola Montès prefigures. The little people. From Freaks by Tod Browning through Lola Montès to the cinematography of Nicolas Roeg. And the tension of Bernard Herrmann. From Psycho to Fahrenheit 451. And even Oskar Werner (who plays a sizable role in Lola Montès). From here to Truffaut.

But the nightmares are only horrible because her life was so vivid…Lola Montès. First with Franz Liszt. And then with mentions of Chopin and Wagner. Even Mozart…

This was romance. A different time.

What love would sustain a warrior in battle?

Simple love. Honest love.

And yet, what love drives a man to the edge?

Romantic love. The femme fatale. Why is it that we never hear of the homme fatal?

All kidding aside, I want to make a very serious point about Lola Montès. It is my belief that this film represents an admirably feminist perspective the intensity of which I have seen nowhere else than in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (4 luni, 3 săptămâni și 2 zile).

For 1955, Lola Montès was a harrowing epic. Because Max Ophüls was a true auteur, it has lost none of its wonder…even in our loveless, edgy world.

Everything proceeds from the first word. But don’t take it too seriously.

It is like many other first words. “Once upon a time…”

From a mist rises Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. Bruckner would use the same device many times (no doubt in honor of Ludwig van).

Yes. We say Ludwig Van in honor of Mauricio Kagel. And the entire spirit of everything here might be compared to Joseph Beuys.

And just like that <bam> we go over-budget.

Jerzy Radziwilowicz plays the Jean-Luc Godard character here (with the wardrobe ostensibly taken right off the back of Jacques Dutronc). Thus Godard still creates a distance between his story and THE story. The whole bit about Poland is made to throw us off the scent (a bit like the glorious obfuscation of Joyce in Finnegans Wake).

We find Godard to be right. The available forms are too mundane. The audience stops thinking when they are comfortable. So we must disorient them a bit–prod like a brainiac Hitchcock.

You see, the most important thing is not who acted in this film. Rather, the crucial component is the juxtaposition which allows for revelation.

We see the most perfectly-placed tableaux of human paintings. Come to life. The proper term is tableau vivant. Maybe you see them at Christmas. Perhaps a manger and the Christian genesis.

Ah, but with Godard it is Delacroix and Rubens and Rembrandt etc. I assume Ingmar Bergman missed this Godard film because the former had already made up his mind regarding the latter. And thus the admiration flowed in one direction alone. We see the delicacy of Bergman–that technique of the long shot (temporally speaking). You can almost imagine Godard telling his cast of thousands in this mini-epic to have no expression at all.

There is a connection to Stravinsky. Neoclassicism, but really a radical belief in the purity of music. To paraphrase Igor, “Music doesn’t have meaning. A note is a note.” Perhaps I have done the great composer an injustice with my memory. Yet, a paraphrase is a paraphrase.

We humans are not computers. No matter how many books we have. No matter how steel-trap our memory. No matter how fast our Internet.

And thus, that which is juxtaposed against the meticulous composition of the tableaux vivants? Everyday life. Careless shots. The beauty of the sky. The natural sway of a handheld camera. The sun as it burns up the lens upon peeking through the bare trees. Hanna Schygulla running through the snow with a lavender umbrella.

Real life. Labor. A factory. And who is the real star? Isabelle Huppert. Her character in Sauve qui peut (la vie) was not a sympathetic one. Can we say? WE had no sympathy for her. Very little. Not none.

Yet here…she is the lamb of God (of which she speaks). Huppert is the labor element. Workers’ rights. It is intimated that her monotonous job has caused her to stutter. Why? Because it is not easy to talk about the factory.

And why, she asks, are people in films never shown working? It is not allowed. Filming in factories. Indeed, I believe there is a specifically French meaning here. [And Swiss, as the film is shot in Switzerland.] But the real shocker? Work and sex (“pornography”) are equally prohibited on the screen.

Only Godard would find this fascinating link. And that is why we love him.

But mostly it is another thing.

Life is so much richer in the films of Godard. Sure, there are some exceptions, but the exceptions themselves are merely the process being revealed. It is “the thinking life” to paraphrase Henry Miller.

Once you have been there, you don’t want to go back. Or you can’t go back. But we do go back. Thinking is hard work.

And as the world bemoans what havoc Europe has wrought, let it be noted…the Beethovens, Mozarts, Dvoraks…

This is the humanism which little by little comes to occupy the mature films of Jean-Luc Godard.

When Betty is weightless…remembering the good times…champagne. And now she is merely a wage slave. Trading places.

No talking. Some intertitles. And prominently (most prominently) that music! A choice…by someone. It makes a difference.

Put a murder to the tendresse of Beethoven. A birth to Schoenberg.

The orchestra makes a difference. That flat, unwieldy oboe line…

Yes, I know it’s polytonal, but the intonation is rubbish. Like the Salvation Army rendition of “Abide with Me” at the beginning of Fist of Fury. Makes Monk and Coltrane sound absolutely polished.

No, I can’t stand it. Gordon Harker is great…just as he was in The Farmer’s Wife. Without italics that sounds positively lascivious. Thank god for capitalization.

Did Hitchcock predict the stock market crash of ’29? A case could be made. Yet here it is charade.

Betty falls prey to Bresson’s predecessor…pickpocket filmed from the waist down. Rage Over a Lost Penny. Op. 129. I’m just venting.

Gordon Harker parenting. Like Gregg Popovich. Pride in the name of love.

Nothing’s going very well for Betty. Taken literally, this is a nihilist coup. But just ask Bert Williams: nothing don’t put food on the table. Nobody.

More like “nothing to see here”… Hitchcock would lament to Truffaut. Nevertheless, the particular transfer I have (and the Romantic soundtrack) made this an interesting journey. Most of all we learn that the auteur theorists were right: geniuses never make bad films.

You will not learn much on Wikipedia. In this case. It is a common problem. The length of an entry indicates its importance to the English-speaking world. You will not get a true sense of what this film is about. To the English-speaking world, this film is apparently insignificant.

And so we turn to images. Language has betrayed us. Our mother tongue.

There we immediately find a better representation. The Hermès handbag.

Yet still the film remains elusive.

Some might say barbaric. Others, a film about nothing.

They are both right…and wrong.

It is Mozart who proves them wrong. I will not give you a Köchel number. We can’t be experts about everything.

This is not academic writing. I take my leisure seriously.

Taken out of context, it is the rage of a spurned Hitchcock.

It is the red stub of Blandine Jeanson (c’est-à-dire Emily Brontë).

Perhaps it is the groovy sounds of Jean-Claude Vannier?

As Paul Gégauff plays (?), the man with the shovel shuffles away. He is our stable element…briefly.

You see the trouble.

Is it barbarism to cradle the contrasting beauty? Is it nothing to show that everything is something?

Not easy being cheesy…

This is why it is better not to attempt…to explain.

It has been done. What’s the point?

Each tenured prophet will find his/her own signs.

The important thing is to give the immediate impression. Do not go for a snack. Attack the film, but not to analyze. Attack your own feelings and emotions…and wrest them from oblivion to perhaps live a life of their own. This is what we do.

From the first words, we cannot start like the rest.

The great folly would be to make Godard into God. The greater folly to ignore the breathtaking precedence.

In art as war, pity the one to go first…running from the secure positions.

And so we embrace the greatest uncertainty.

The varieties of human experience people…have not visited my corner for census.

Nor Jean-Luc’s…here. We can celebrate the hulking awkwardness of a master who is perfectly describing chaos.

It is not sloppy. It is calculated. But it is a non-terminating number. An infinite precision.

Balance on one finger and eat banana cream pie.

Perfectly upside-down.

It is not clean and crisp. Not easily digestible.

We look longingly for personality, but none is found…

And then a film like Week-end…all personality. Character. Eccentricity. Color. Vigor.

Buried in the footnotes of civilization is a question about civilization itself.

This.

It explains why we never succeeded in life. Had we done so, it would have been a fluke.

We were not meant to succeed. Search your heart and then regard the world…